SE4 Deluxe

[Fyron]

We were hoping not to have this posted on the forums, and for MM to have released a fix by now...

[PvK]

Oh...

Is that for both issues?

[Fyron]

Dunno about the fleets. I seem to recall reading that at some point the game runs out of default names to assign, which leads to utter insanity. Never encountered it myself so I can't tell you more.

[Spoo]

So does this affect other things in settings.txt? If so, this bug could be HUGE with regards to cheating in multiplayer!

[douglas]

Spoo said:
So does this affect other things in settings.txt? If so, this bug could be HUGE with regards to cheating in multiplayer!

You could change every single line in settings.txt and it would not affect your ability to open and play a turn. This isn't actually a big deal for most settings, though, because the host's settings.txt file is the only one that matters for how the turn is processed. The only reason fleeting bases is an issue is that it appears to be implemented entirely by removing the UI for adding bases to fleets rather than building the limitation into turn processing. The only other thing in settings.txt that I think is open to abuse because of this are the characteristic upper and lower limits. Trying to change the costs won't get you anywhere because the total points spent is recalculated on the host's machine when he adds the empires, but the minimum and maximum characteristic values are only checked when editing the empire, which the host does not normally do.

[AMF]

I can confirm that there appears to be a limit to the number of fleets one can have. I had a reproducible error that I encountered many times in the Ankle-Biters game when I reached the point where my fleet names had run out of default greek letters and I just got a blank name. I can go back and look for the post (it was quite a while ago) but like I mentioned above I can say it was reproducible and always seemed to happen when I fleeted units. At the time I hit "create fleet" the game would hang and would have to be ctrl-alt-del killed and restarted.

I got around this by naming fleets on my own rather than just letting the game assign names.

Hope this helps

Alarik

[AMF]

I encountered this whole settings.txt thing a while back, and thought it was an exploit too. I realized one could use it to make the atmosphere of all the planets breathable. But since the hosts settings.txt is the one used, I eventually figured it didn't matter.

Alarik

[geoschmo]

There are a couple things you could do by changing settings.txt that would allow you to cheat a little. There is nothing earth shatteringly unbalancing, as all the stuff that would seriously affect game balance is not processed until the host turn and thus would ignore the player's settings changes anyway.